Robert Fisk trains his eye on the worrisome trend toward blinding the eyes of the public, journalists as targeted by extremists in the field and sometimes ignored by the military:
Yet our job [as journalists] is now ever more cabin'd, cribbed, confined. And "our" side likes it that way. Neither the Americans nor the British want us scurrying around unsupervised in Iraq, nosing out the lies of our governments, uncovering the dirty deeds of the US air force in Iraq or, for that matter, in Afghanistan.
And so it has come to pass. We cannot move in most of Iraq for fear of being butchered by our countries' enemies. We cannot move in southern Afghanistan. Italian journalists might be ransomed by their governments. Afghan journalists - I am thinking of the reporter/translator of the Italian who was kidnapped - simply have their heads chopped off. Never has reporting been so circumscribed by these terrors. Never have we been so poorly informed.
BBC's petition to focus World Opinion on the horrific transgression of kidnapping Alan Johnston.International Press Institute's recent resolutions.
